Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Christmas Songs I Hate

I got all wound up driving home from work yesterday when that stupid song "Christmas Shoes" came over the radio waves. First of all, it's all mushy and crap, and I hate mushy stuff. And then it's just dumb. Why the heck would that stupid kid buy his dying mom shoes to wear to heaven? How come he knows about heaven but doesn't know that earthly possessions are worthless there? When he's in his thirties, lying on his therapist's couch, he's gonna wish he spent all that extra time actually with his dying mother instead of bumming money off strangers and pushing them around so he can buy her some shoes (which, in all the physical renditions of the song I've seen, are butt-ugly anyway).

I also hate "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." One, Santa isn't real. The kid seems to understand some of the significance of kissing, yet hasn't learned that Santa Claus is a myth. Maybe that's fine; strike that argument from the record (I don't know enough about child development to make an authoritative case). But what is completely abhorrent is the kid's lack of understanding in what it means to kiss another man besides one's husband. The truth is, if Daddy had seen that (presuming Santa is real, and it's not actually Daddy in the Santa costume), it wouldn't have been a laugh at all. "If Daddy had only seen," Daddy would have slapped Mommy, shot Santa, and kicked Mommy out of the house, and that kid would be all wrapped up in a terrible battle of custody. I can see how the song's irony (Santa is actually Daddy) was meant to be cute and amusing, but I think it's a gross misrepresentation of American family values.